Ex-Nets Star Faces Retrial for a Shooting at His Home

TRENTON, April 21 - Jayson Williams can be retried on a charge of reckless manslaughter stemming from the shooting of a limousine driver in 2002, a New Jersey appeals court ruled on Friday.

Mr. Williams, 38, a former basketball star for St. John's University and the New Jersey Nets, was acquitted in April 2004 of aggravated manslaughter, the most serious charge he faced, in the shooting of the driver, Costas Christofi, in Mr. Williams's home in Hunterdon County.

Mr. Williams was also acquitted on assault and weapons charges, and was convicted on four charges related to covering up the fatal shooting.

But the jury deadlocked on the charge of reckless manslaughter.

Mr. Williams has been free on bail but faces up to 13 years in prison at sentencing, which the Superior Court judge presiding over the case, Edward M. Coleman, has said will occur after the second trial.

Lawyers for Mr. Williams had sought to avoid a second trial by filing an appeal arguing that it would amount to double jeopardy.

The three-member appeals panel rejected that argument, citing precedents in which defendants, in circumstances like Mr. Williams's, had been retried on lesser charges.

Those precedents apply, the panel wrote, "when the inability to reach a verdict relates to a lesser included crime and an acquittal has been rendered on the greater crime."

The ruling also rejected a contention by Mr. Williams's lawyers that a retrial was "fundamentally unfair."

"We see no such unfairness," the appeals panel wrote.

The ruling clears the way for Judge Coleman to reschedule Mr. Williams's retrial, which was to begin in March 2005 but was postponed so that the appeal could be heard.

Steven C. Lember, the first assistant prosecutor in Hunterdon County, declined to comment, citing a court order that prevents lawyers from speaking about the case.

Judy Smith, a spokeswoman for Mr. Williams, said his lawyers planned to appeal Friday's ruling.

The ruling of the appeals court did provide Mr. Williams's lawyers with two victories: It upheld decisions by Judge Coleman to disallow testimony about Mr. Williams's conduct after the shooting of Mr. Christofi and about previous shooting cases.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Christofi was killed when Mr. Williams snapped closed the barrels of a shotgun and the gun fired at Mr. Christofi a few feet away.

Mr. Williams contends that the shooting was an accident and that his behavior was not reckless.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Williams's wife, Tanya, expressed confidence that a jury in a second trial would acquit her husband. She said, however, that Mr. Williams, to spare his family, and Mr. Christofi's, the emotional strain of another trial, planned to appeal Friday's ruling to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

"For the past four years, we've been in this storm," Mrs. Williams said. "Hopefully, by going to the Supreme Court, it will end the storm."